Beware the Solitary Drinker (16 page)

His name was Bob Lewis, and he wasn't a bullshit guy, so I leveled with him. And it seemed he leveled with me.

“The cops asked a lot of questions about her,” he said, once the preliminaries and my first cup of coffee were finished. “I don't think I told them anything very important.”

“Who'd she hang out with? Any of the other waiters or waitresses?”

Bob Lewis shook his head.

“Did you spend any time with her?”

He shuffled around, looking a little sheepish.

“You slept with her?”

“Just once.”

“Did anyone else.”

He didn't know. “Most of the waiters are fags, so I doubt it.”

“Any special customers?”

“The cops asked me that. I told them, no. But there was one guy who came in pretty regularly for lunch—an older guy.”

“Wear a suit?”

“I think so.”

“What'd he drink?”

“Jack Daniels on the rocks.”

“Did he stand up all the time?”

Bob Lewis looked perplexed. “Stand up? I don't remember.”

When I got to Pop's house in Brooklyn, I went over everything I'd found out since I'd seen him last. I told him I was stymied. Nothing I found out led me anywhere.

Pop put on the coffee pot to heat up, and we sat down at his dining room table. “Most reporters already have the lead in mind when they go to get the story,” he said. “They already think they know what the story is about and what they should be finding out. It's like finding proof for your theory. Sometimes they're wrong. But most of the time it beats stumbling around in the dark.”

I wasn't so sure. “It sounds to me like you're still stumbling around in the dark. You just pretend you know where you're going.”

Pop digested this with some difficulty. Then, he jumped up to run into the kitchen to remove the boiling coffee from the gas-jet flame. He came back muttering and swearing at the pot and poured out two cups. I sipped my burned coffee, rubbing my fingers against the dark mahogany of the dining room table. On the sideboard that didn't quite match the table was a picture of my mother when she was young, holding a curly-haired child whom my father said was me. Next to this picture stood my high school graduation picture: a truculent youth with Vaseline slicked-back hair and a sneer for a smile. My father was watching me when I drifted back to the present. I realized he must be lonely.

“Unless you have a better idea, why not follow a hunch? Pick someone. Investigate him. Try to trap him. If he comes out clean, go on to someone else.”

I didn't like this plan. I didn't like my father proposing it, either. “Do you think that's fair? Isn't that what happened to you?”

His face blanched. I felt like I'd slapped him. He sat still, leaning on his dining room armchair, as if only those wooden arms kept him from sinking. Even for these informal discussions, my father sat in his designated chair at the head of the table.

When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “You can't tell anyone your suspicions. You can't accuse anyone until you're certain. Those people—the slime from the FBI—didn't investigate me. You've got that wrong. They set out to destroy me. They had no interest in finding out the truth.”

“I wasn't trying to compare you.…” My voice shook. We'd never talked like this before.

“You think you know what happened during that time?” he asked sadly.

“I was here.”

Tears formed in his eyes. He made no attempt to wipe them away. With all my heart, I wanted to get up from my chair to go to him and put my arms around him. But years of restrained emotions held me back. The McNulty men, poor Kevin, too—no emotions on our sleeves—full of all this love and not able to get it out.

***

Later that afternoon, in a somber mood, I opened my apartment door for Janet. Seeing her surprised and comforted me. I wanted to put my arms around her too, but again I held back.

“The police found a bloodstained jacket in the garbage chute at Danny's building on Amsterdam,” she told me before I'd even closed the door. “It's his. Danny said he'd lost it. Peter said he might have lost it at Oscar's the last time he played there.”

“Nice to see you, too,” I said.

“Peter said it's a set-up,” Janet went on, ignoring what I said. “Ozzie was shot in bed. Why would Danny have gotten blood on his jacket?”

“It might be worth finding out when he did lose the jacket,” I said, walking her into my living room.

Janet nodded absently as she walked. We both knew the last night Danny played at Oscar's was the night Angelina was killed.

“I told you you can't trust the cops,” I told her. “They plant evidence.”

“You don't know it was the cops. It could have been anybody.”

I didn't trust Sheehan. Janet did. I was still smarting over the Boss finding us in the cellar. And I kept thinking it was my fault Ozzie got killed because I told Sheehan about him. The cops didn't tell us what they knew. Why should we tell them anything?

Now, I wondered if the cops kept a record of the complaint the porno actress made against Nigel. Did they decide to drop it because Nigel was the wrong guy? Or was it that cops are underpaid and overworked, and this girl wasn't important enough to jack them into using up their time? I'd have liked to get my hands on the police report. But I didn't want to send Janet to Peter to try to get it. I didn't want to seem like I was making accusations against Nigel again. Whatever I thought of Nigel, it wasn't right. Accusations were dirty stuff that followed you around, making you an outcast whether you deserved it or not. Just like someone accusing your old man of being a Communist.

“I checked into Hanrahan's,” I told Janet instead. “It looks as if there was an older man she was involved with there, too. But I don't know if it means anything. I didn't think to ask the bartender if the guy still came in to Hanrahan's.”

“You mean if he stopped coming in after Angelina's death, then…?”

“Or after Ozzie got killed. I don't know. I just should've asked if he still came in.”

“Are you sure it was Ozzie?”

“I would be if I'd remembered to ask.”

Janet plopped down on the couch, sighing and looking exasperated. “We have so many different possibilities I don't know what to do. This person at Hanrahan's may not have anything to do with anything. But we should still find out; don't you think?”

“We should. But that reminds me—” I gathered up about a week's worth of the
Daily News
so I could sit down beside her. “Can you get the court records from the time Angelina was molested when she was a kid?”

Janet cleared her throat loudly enough to make me stop my gathering and turn toward her. Her eyes narrowed with worry. Getting up from the couch, she began pacing, not looking at me. She looked like Eric did the night he came out of the men's room to tell me he'd accidentally dropped my packet of coke into the toilet.

“It wasn't reported,” she said very quietly.

I stared at her, grappling with my armload of newspapers.

She sat down again and fidgeted with her fingers in her lap. She spoke looking down at them. “My mother didn't file a complaint, so the police dropped the charges.”

“Why didn't she file a complaint?”

“It was a college boy who molested Angelina. His father paid her a lot of money. He said my mom could use it to send Angelina to college. But, really, he had my mother figured out. He gave the money to her. Angelina never got it. A couple of years later, Angelina was raped again. This time by a friend of my mother's. Angelina kept trying to please everyone.” Janet cried while she told me this. The longer she talked, the harder she cried, until she wailed like a baby, her face blotching red, her eyes swimming in tears.

This valley of tears, my mother used to say. I stood awkwardly over Janet while she hid her face and cried. I told her once or twice that everything was okay.

She turned her blotchy and tear-stained face toward me accusingly. “My sister's dead,” she screamed. “How can that be okay?”

“It isn't,” I said, then left her alone to cry and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I sat at my small kitchen table watching the water boil until she joined me.

“It's hard to admit that I come from such an awful family,” she said.

I couldn't answer her; I wondered if my own son would say that someday. Again, I was reminded I owed him something, like maybe making sure he knew he had folks who cared about him more than Angelina's cared about her.

“What's with your mother anyway? Didn't she know she was supposed to take care of Angelina?”

We sat across from one another drinking coffee until the red blotches were gone from her face and her eyes became clear. “My mother thinks she's perfect. Because she's perfect, everyone else has to be also. That's what was wrong with my father: He wasn't good enough for her…and then Angelina was her little doll. When she was little, Mom even tried to make her a child model. Then, this thing happened.…Angelina was abused, so she was tainted. She wasn't perfect anymore, and my mother couldn't stand her.…Pretty awful, eh?”

“What about you?”

“I'm her last hope, the accomplishment in her life. I'm a success, she thinks, so she is also.”

Janet didn't hide the bitterness, so I wondered, without asking, what her success meant to her. The more you find out about people, the more tangled up you find their lives really are. I got this awful feeling I might be normal, after all.

When I thought Janet had calmed down enough, I asked again about Angelina's rape, which even she had trouble putting the right name to.

“What was this college boy's name?”

“I don't know.”

“What did he look like?”

“I never saw him.”

“Maybe you could ask your mother.”

Janet shook her head slowly.

“What do you mean, no?”

She winced but continued to shake her head. “The arrangement was that mother never divulge his name. I'm not even sure she knows.”

“She must know what he looks like.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I snorted. “Maybe she wouldn't remember the person who raped her ten-year-old daughter?” I glared at Janet, as if it were her doing. But she hadn't raised her eyes from her lap and didn't see me.

With a good deal of effort, I convinced Janet that she had to go back to Springfield and find out all she could about what happened, no matter what she thought her mother would say. But there was a price to pay. Janet demanded I go with her. I tried to squirm out of it but finally agreed to go on Tuesday, my night off. Maybe something would break in the meanwhile. We'd teach the horse to talk.

In the meanwhile, I asked, apologetically, if she'd find out a couple of things about Carl for me.

“Why?” She acted like I'd kicked a baby.

I was embarrassed myself. I didn't really think Carl killed Angelina, and I wasn't accusing him of anything, so I thought it was okay to turn Janet loose. “I don't want to, myself,” I said. “I don't want to find out things about him he doesn't tell me himself. It's not the same for you. You only have to tell me things if it's relevant, which I don't think it will be.”

“If you don't suspect him, why are we doing this?”

I tried to be placating. “We have to check out everyone if we're going to do this right,” I said in what I thought passed for a reasonable tone. “What you shouldn't do is accuse anyone, talk about your suspicions, or tell anyone what you find out.” I sounded very wise to myself.

Janet rolled her eyes like she knew I was full of shit but went off to call her mother and make arrangements to go to Springfield and to find out what she could about Carl. I went over to the dope store on Amsterdam to buy a couple of joints for work and ran right into him. Despite the fact that he looked more sinister now that he was under investigation than I ever would have thought possible, Carl was just as friendly and distracted as ever.

“I've got some information for you,” he said brightly.

“Oh?”

“The girl in the movie with Eric the Red and me. Her name is Sharon Collins. She used to work at the Buffalo Roadhouse in the Village.”

“Maybe she still does?”

“Maybe, but I haven't seen her there.”

Now why did he tell me that? I wondered as he walked away.

I didn't drink that night at work. The next day, I couldn't reach Janet on the phone, so, to take my mind off everything for a while, I took in a Rip Torn movie I wanted to see and went to work feeling virtuous. When I got home, there was a message from Janet telling me things were set for visiting her mother on Tuesday and she hadn't found out anything about Carl but would call when she did.

The following day, I couldn't reach Janet, and she hadn't picked up my message by that evening. I began to worry—less that something had happened than that she was now shacking up with Peter Finch.

To avoid drowning my sorrows in the Terrace, I took the train to the Village that afternoon. The Buffalo Roadhouse, made of glass and blonde wood, looked like a joint you could make a buck in. The brunch crowd filled all of the tables; the bar had a good crowd, too. Whenever I ate brunch, I got filled up on sugar and booze and felt waterlogged, then went to sleep for the rest of the day. I ordered a soda with lime.

“I'm looking for Sharon Collins,” I told the bartender when he put the drink down. He ignored me. I pushed the change from my five into the rail on his side of the bar.

“She doesn't work here anymore. She went back home a couple of months ago.”

“Where's home?” He looked me in the eye. The change from a five was a good tip, but not enough to sell out a friend. “I'm not after her for anything. She's a friend of mine. I work uptown at a place called Oscar's.”